Special Forces: U.S. 'Eyes' Deep in Enemy Territory : Commandos: Elite troops use high-tech equipment and deception to operate effectively behind Iraqi lines.

By MELISSA HEALY

Feb. 28, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — Using high-tech parachutes to drift through the night sky above Iraqi positions, sometimes traveling 30 miles or more, American Special Forces teams equipped with night-vision goggles and special radios reported from midair on enemy formations below.

Green Berets, living in sandy burrows for days at a time to escape detection, infiltrated deep behind Iraqi lines--into the very heart of Saddam Hussein’s most fearsome ground units. They fed vital intelligence to allied commanders weeks before the ground war began.

Other Special Operations units disabled communications towers and water wells, used lasers to target Scud missile launchers and tank emplacements for aerial attack and placed explosive charges on bridges to cut off future avenues of retreat for Iraq’s Republican Guard troops.

These and countless other Special Operations forces “were the eyes that were out there,” said Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in Operation Desert Storm--the eyes and also the claws that penetrated the skin of Iraq’s elite forces and helped sow the seeds of their destruction.

U.S. commando teams even planned and apparently executed “snatches”--wartime kidnapings--of Iraqi soldiers, said one knowledgeable official, bringing vital human intelligence assets to planners in the rear.

Yet, effective as these forces proved to be, employing their particular talents and capabilities was not a foregone conclusion. In earlier times and under earlier U.S. leaders, they might have stayed at home.

“The real story is that Gen. Schwarzkopf was willing and allowed to use these forces at all,” said William Cowan, a former Special Operations officer and president of a Washington-area defense consulting firm. “There’s been substantial reluctance for political purposes to use them in past years, given the risks that their detection could cause an international flap for the Bush Administration.”

But Cowan added that the use of the elite military commandos in Iraq also reflects the Pentagon’s renewed confidence in Special Operations forces as an effective, high-precision tool in the nation’s military’s toolbox. That attitude, in turn, results from nearly a decade of vastly increased funding and congressional attention to the Special Operations mission.

For the Special Forces, that attention has brought new technology straight out of James Bond:

* Hand-held devices allow commandos to eavesdrop on radio transmissions of nearby units.

* Hughes 500-MDs helicopters, equipped with virtually silent rotor blades, can fly 10 feet off the ground at night to insert and extract Special Operations units.

* Portable communications systems can deliver short bursts of information over secure satellite links from hiding places deep in enemy territory.

* “Stealth” parachutes allow commandos either to hang-glide for miles or to open their chutes when they are just 1,000 feet above the ground and still land safely.

The new funding and political attention has also brought new organizational clout to the Special Forces community. The establishment by Congress of a new “U.S. Special Operations Command” in the mid-1980s gave the scattered and weak commando forces a high-level advocate in the Pentagon and a single new home at McDill Air Force Base in Florida--next door to Schwarzkopf’s headquarters.

The Green Berets who conducted patrols deep into Iraq--as distinguished from the Black Berets who conducted more shallow penetrations--are the successors to the “Lurps” of Vietnam, so called because of their long-range patrols into North Vietnamese territory.

But like so much of Schwarzkopf’s battle plan, the use of Special Operations in Operation Desert Storm had its roots in U.S. planning for a massive land war against the Soviets and their allies on the plains of Central Europe.

In such a war, one of the principal missions that Special Forces were slated to execute was called Strategic Intelligence and Target Acquisition: They were to be inserted deep behind the lines of the Warsaw Pact to watch for armored and infantry forces moving toward the battlefield and pinpoint them, using laser beacons and hand-held transponders, for attack by NATO warplanes.

The tactic was developed because U.S. satellites could not provide around-the-clock coverage, and foul weather would ground reconnaissance aircraft.

Special Forces teams were used in a similar way as artillery spotters in the Vietnam War, but the relatively unsophisticated communications gear of that period sometimes posed problems that apparently did not trouble teams in Iraq.

A Marine artillery veteran of the war in Southeast Asia recalled that getting a fire-mission request from a Special Forces team was often a special headache. The teams operated so close to Vietnamese positions that they had to whisper to avoid being detected. “It wasn’t easy hearing a whisper on those radios,” he said.

In the Mideast, stormy weather and Iraqi deception methods made it difficult to get a fix on Iraq’s combat power. When Schwarzkopf’s intelligence picture faltered, Army commandos and Marine Corps reconnaissance teams became the eyes and ears of the Central Command.

In the deserts and wadis--dry riverbeds--of southern and western Iraq, some of the most spectacular feats of deception by the U.S. commandos involved a ruse the teams had practiced over and over in training: They would come in under cover of darkness and sneak toward an encampment whose activities they wanted to spy on.

Then, they would dig themselves and their rucksacks into holes, sometimes with a periscope-type device protruding, and settle in to observe.

“Especially in the desert, a lot of these troops are trained for doing this,” said one former Army commando. “I’ve walked through areas and stepped right on them, passed right over them, and didn’t even know they were there.”

Other commando teams used even dicier techniques. According to one informed source, during some of the tensest times, some U.S. Green Berets went into Kuwait city and Baghdad and even to Iraqi military encampments in the guise of third-country salesmen, peddling military spare parts and food then in short supply.

At the same time, many of Great Britain’s elite Special Air Service commandos were wandering the Kuwaiti and Iraqi desert in Bedouin garb.

In addition to gathering critical military intelligence, the SAS commandos used hand-held laser devices to “paint” Iraq’s most elusive targets, such as Scud launchers and headquarters and communications vans. Allied warplanes then would swoop in and deliver laser-guided bombs that would find their way to the laser-painted targets.

Meanwhile, Navy commandos and Marine reconnaissance units from ships in the Gulf plied the waterways of Kuwait, deactivating Iraqi sea mines and scouting for Iraqi encampments that could threaten the amphibious landing that never proved necessary.

Schwarzkopf said Special Forces troops also were assigned to every Arab unit that went into battle, to act as liaison with other English-speaking units and to coordinate artillery and air strikes. They also handled all combat search-and-rescue missions, he said.

“When a pilot gets shot down out there in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the enemy and you’re the folks that are required to go in . . . after them, that is a very tough mission and that was one of their missions,” the general said.

The success of the U.S. Special Forces in Operation Desert Storm comes a year after American commandos fruitlessly hounded Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega through Panama’s countryside. This time, said Cowan, Gen. Schwarzkopf used them well, and U.S. infantry troops benefited.

But if Operation Desert Storm marks a turnaround for Special Forces, it is nothing compared to the transformation those elite troops have made since Vietnam, when one senior official conceded that some commandos “were a little out on the fringe.”

“The money spent on Special Forces has nothing to do with this. The missions they performed were exactly the missions they had in Vietnam. The difference is in their leadership and their motivation. These are superior troops. They’re more educated, more motivated, better led.”